3.1Why Policies Must Be Code

Static analysis tools catch what terraform validate cannot: security misconfigurations, compliance violations, and organizational policy breaches. The critical insight is that policies written in documentation get ignored, while policies written in code get enforced automatically on every commit.

Policy-as-code transforms statements like "all S3 buckets must be encrypted" from a wiki page that developers forget to read into an automated gate that blocks non-compliant infrastructure from reaching production.